My father’s memories—hurt, anger, fear—burned in my veins. The terrifying dual-blade of his love and his disgust for my mother. I hated feeling it.

I hated him for feeling it.

I stared at that obelisk. I blinked and a tear rolled down my cheek.

I didn’t want to.

The memories, the emotions, had only grown more intense as I moved to the center of the room. I was losing my grip on myself. This, I feared, might break me. Worse, it might break whatever fragile image I still had of the father that I’d loved—the father that had loved me.

What a fucking coward it made me, to still treasure that, after everything.

But I came here for a reason. There was only one place to go next. One remaining piece of the lock.

I stood, swaying on my feet. Stepped into the final circle.

I didn’t need to open the gash again. My hand was already covered in blood.

I laid it against the stone.

70

RAIHN

My wings wouldn’t work. I couldn’t slow myself, stop myself, before the ground rose up to hit me.

Pain. I tried to move. Something cracked.

I couldn’t make my eyes open. When I tried, a face I hadn’t seen in a very, very long time leaned over me.

My brow furrowed.

Nessanyn?

She looked just as she had two hundred years ago, curly dark hair falling around her face as she leaned down next to me. Her eyes, chestnut-dark and a million miles deep, stared hard into me, wet with tears.

Who wins? she asked, voice cracking. Who wins, if you fight him?

She’d said it to me so many times, back then. Countless times, dragging me back from the line every time I thought I would cross it.

I’d always thought that Nessanyn was so much stronger than I was.

But now, in this version of her, it seemed so obvious that she was just terrified. She was a lonely and abused woman who was a prisoner in her own marriage.

She didn’t fight because she was too afraid. Because it took a stupid kind of courage to keep fighting even when you knew every odd was stacked against you.

I reached out and touched her chin. She grabbed my hand and held it there, a tear rolling down her cheek.

Who wins? she said again.

Maybe not me, I replied. But worth a try, right?

She tried to hold onto my hand, but I pulled it away.

I opened my eyes.

Above me, carnage unfolded in the skies. Spatters of blood from warriors locked in battle hundreds of feet above dripped onto the rocks like black rain. A drop of it struck my cheek.

It was a nightmare. The kind of sight that, I knew in this moment, would wake me in a cold sweat ten years from now. If I was lucky enough to make it that far.

I tried to push myself up. A spasm of agony took my breath away.

Ix’s fucking tits. My body was broken. Absolutely broken. I’d pushed it too far these last few weeks. Whatever Simon had just done to me had nudged it over the edge.

I’d died before. I knew what it felt like to stand on the precipice of the end.

Not yet.

I lifted my head. Another drop of blood from above struck my forehead, rolling down into my right eye, tinting the world black-red. Through it, I took in the ruins around me. I’d landed on a rock, smashing up my right side. My wings were still out, though I could tell right away that the right one was now useless. That arm, too, refused to cooperate when I reached for my sword. I grabbed the hilt with the left one instead, every muscle protesting the weight.

I lifted my head.

There, through the ruins, Simon staggered to his feet. The front of his leathers was smeared with blood. One of his wings was askew in all the wrong places, sticky black blood matting the feathers. The—thing on his chest pulsed brighter now, bright enough that it surged through the night and illuminated the harsh panes of his face from below.

He swayed back and forth, clutching his head, letting out a chilling roar that sounded like it belonged to an animal.

Then he straightened, and his eyes fell on me.

I dug my sword into the ground and used it to force myself upright.

Sun fucking take me.

My knees almost buckled. Almost.

I didn’t show it. I just smiled. Didn’t realize how much blood was in my mouth until the expression made it dribble down my chin.

I was eternally conscious of the door behind me—the door that Simon’s gaze fixed on, before returning to me.

No, he wasn’t getting past me.

I’d spent long enough letting him into my thoughts, my fears. I’d given him too damned much already.

This was where it ended. Whatever it cost.

I lifted my sword, forced my violently trembling right arm to join my left.

Come on, I told my body, when it nearly wept in protest. One last fight. You’ve got it in you, old man.

Amazing what a mindset could do.

Because when Simon lunged at me, lips twisted into a snarl, unnatural magic flaring around him like fire around a match, I was ready.

71

ORAYA

My father stood before me.

The room had grown dim and hazy, as if coated in a thick fog. Nothing felt real except for the foggy, gray nothingness.

Foggy, gray nothingness, and him.

I had dreamt of Vincent countless times. But this version of him felt so much more real than even the most vivid of them. The fine details of his face struck me like a knife to the chest—all the things I didn’t realize I’d forgotten, like the slight crookedness to his nose or the way his hair favored the left side over the right. The version of him in my mind was generic, sanded down by months of absence, even as my grief clung to him.

I said, mostly because I needed to remind myself, “You’re not real.”

None of this was real.

Vincent smiled sadly at me.

“Aren’t I?”

Mother. His voice.

“I’m real in every way that matters,” he said.

“You’re a dream. A hallucination. I’ve lost a lot of blood and—”

“I left so much of myself here, in this room.” Vincent’s eyes lifted, as if taking in this place beyond what was shrouded in darkness. “More than I ever had intended to give it. And all of that still remains, even if I do not. Isn’t that real, little serpent?”

It seemed so, so real.

“I’m inventing you,” I whispered. “Because you’re what I want to see.”

He lifted one shoulder in a delicate half-shrug. It was such a familiar movement, it made my breath stutter. “Perhaps,” he said. “Does it matter?”

In this moment, it felt like it didn’t.

He stepped closer, and I took a step back. He froze, momentary pain crossing his face.

“The things you’ve seen here have so tainted your image of me? I meant to give this place all my greatest achievements, my greatest ambitions. Instead, it became a monument to all my greatest mistakes.”

So many mistakes in the end. Never you.

Vincent’s final words flitted through my mind. He flinched, as if he heard them too.

“So many mistakes in the end,” he murmured. “I never wanted you to see this version of me.”

“I never wanted to see you this way.”

And Goddess, I meant it. Sometimes I envied myself from a year ago, who’d known, beyond any doubt, that her father loved her. Yes, it was the only thing she could believe in, but that, at least, was solid, immovable.

Losing my trust in Vincent was more than losing trust in a single person. It had broken something within me, destroyed my ability to put that trust into anyone else.

Pain flashed over his face, there and gone again so quickly, I thought it might be a trick of the light. The idea that this version of him could be a figment of my own mind slipped further away. If it was a hallucination, it was such a perfect one that it might as well be real.